Stop, Listen, Contemplate

Posts Tagged baking

Happy New Year! We celebrated the new year by taking a bold step into outer space, this is the landscape we came upon, probably a landscape never seen before by man, let alone visited in person! (Click to enlarge)

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Seriously though, we baked some Betty Crocker Fudge Brownies….

We haven’t tried them yet, but I bet they’ll be smashingly good. Anyway, this brings me finally to the point of this post! On the back of the package, we found this text (click to zoom in):

I’m no physics or chemistry expert so I was a bit amused by this special attention given to people living at a high altitude. And I would really like to know how the high altitude affects brownie making! Does it rise higher, or does it not rise as much? Very very intriguing!!! If you care to share your expertise and/or experience on this matter, please comment. Also, if you got pictures of brownies taken at different altitudes (but other factors remain unchanged) do share, please! (For your reference, I used a plate that was roughly 10″ by 8″ in size, and the brownie turned out to be about 1.5″ tall.)

Well over this past weekend me and Hikaru decided to create this year’s Gingerbread House, a tradition we have had for, oh, all of one year (!) by now…. Anyway, this year we wanted to surpass last year’s house and create something special. Mind you, we are still very much novices when it comes to gingerbread house creating, and we have long to go up to mastering the art.

Last year, we simply bought one ready-made house (in parts though, but no baking required) from Swedish makers Anna’s and put it together and focused on the decorating. It looked kinda nice for a first house. Check image below (click to zoom):

This year, though, we wanted to increase the quality and do something a little bit better. Still, we didn’t feel brave enough to bake a house completely from scratch, so we decided to go with Anna’s again, although this time we bought three (3!) sets, planning on customizing them into one, big house. Sure, if we’re into customizing gingerbread houses, it’s a lot easier to do so before the dough is cooked – but since we had the ready made ones, we had no choice. By using high-quality precision GLOBAL knives, we managed to not only customize the houses’ wall and roof parts – but also create some extra addon accessories from the left over pieces! We’re quite happy with the result, check the photo below:

As a final touch, we added some small Santa figurines – and placed them around the house. Here is my favorite one, the master of the house, enjoying a Christmas dinner on the porch…..